Highlights

  • Persona 3 Reload hints at Atlus moving away from silent protagonists in future entries, with a more defined main character.
  • P3R's protagonist uses first-person pronouns, has a strong personality, and more voiced lines in combat, setting him apart.
  • Changes in P5 and P3 Reload could lead to a fully voiced protagonist in Persona 6, creating a more cinematic story.

Persona 3 Reload is the series' first remake, and so P3R occupies a strange place in the franchise. Persona 3 is coming up on its 20th anniversary in two years, but it has also been approximately eight years since P5 was originally released. As a result, Persona 3 Reload is both a return to the series' past and a first look into the developer's approach to the franchise's future. In spite of featuring some of the simplified systems found in the original, P3R is also the most advanced game in the Persona series in terms of presentation. Given the franchise's iterative nature, many elements of Persona 3 Reload are likely to return in the upcoming Persona 6.

Since the original P3, Persona protagonists have been designed to be vessels for the player. Rather than strongly characterizing each main character, Atlus has made them somewhat empty, with the hope that players will be able to insert themselves into the game. Atlus' approach to its silent protagonists is far from unique to the Persona franchise, but it has still become an important part of the series' identity. Certain elements, such as P5's dialogue choices, which seldom alter the overarching story of the game outside of Social Links, function solely to immerse the player in the narrative. Persona 3 Reload may indicate that Atlus is moving away from this approach with future entries, however.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth x Persona 3 Reload
Related
Final Fantasy 7 and Persona Marketing Tactic May Start an Industry-Wide Pattern

The Final Fantasy and Persona franchises don't have too much in common, though there's one shared marketing tactic that could soon become a pattern.

Persona 3 Reload's Protagonist Has a Strong Personality

persona-3-reload-start-dark-hour

Like Persona 5's Joker, P3R's protagonist uses first-person pronouns while narrating his thoughts. The use of the word "I" immediately sets these protagonists apart from those of older entries who generally avoided it. Even more than Joker, the protagonist of Persona 3 Reload, is strongly defined. During the game's opening minutes, he walks through town during Dark Hour and is unphased by the blood and coffins that fill the streets. The game also features far fewer dialogue choices than P5, meaning that its protagonist is more rigid. While he is still silent, P3R's main character is more concretely characterized than other modern Persona protagonists.

Persona 3 Reload Could Be an Indicator of Things to Come

On top of fewer dialogue options and a more defined personality, P3R's protagonist, portrayed in English by Aleks Le, has more voiced lines in combat than previous player characters in the franchise. It seems that Atlus is slowly removing the silence from the series' traditionally silent protagonists. This flies directly in the face of one of the franchise's defining traits thus far, but it continues to build on the trend established by the use of first-person pronouns in P5, and it could be an indicator of what is to come in future entries. Switching to more strongly characterized protagonists would allow for Persona games to have more voice acting and for P6 to take on a different approach to storytelling.

What Will Persona 6's Protagonist Be Like?

Little has been said about Persona 6 by developers at Atlus, but changes to the series made in Persona 5 and Persona 3 Reload could hint at what is to come. Atlus has begun to craft more rigid main characters and, with P3R, has started to make them decreasingly silent. This shift gives some credence to the idea that Persona 6 could be fully voiced and finally buck the tradition of having a silent protagonist. Switching to a fully voiced player character would allow for P6 to be the series' most cinematic and immersive story to date.

Changes made in P5 and P3 Reload indicate that the tradition of silent protagonists in Persona could be coming to an end in P6. Even if Persona 6's hero is still mostly quiet, the series' move toward more strongly defined protagonists seems unlikely to stop. The success of P5 and P3R shows that fans and critics alike are accepting of this shift in the franchise. Giving the main characters of each game a stronger personality could allow Atlus to lean further into the series' themes and allow for them to create more interesting inter-character conflicts.